The rural Midwest, foreign policy, and the ways we do history

Scholars have long challenged the common assumption of midwestern isolationism. In Global Heartland, historian Peter Simons reorients the way we look at the critical period in US history from the 1930s through 1950s, showing how farmers across the Midwest understood their work as contributing to an era of international upheaval, geographical reimagination, and global ecological thinking. Here, Simons is joined in conversation with Michael Lansing about the rural heartland, US foreign policy, and the changing and multidisciplinary ways that scholars approach history.

Peter Simons is a historian in upstate New York and author of Global Heartland: Cultivating the American Century on the Midwestern Farm.

Michael Lansing is a professor of history at Augsburg University and author of Insurgent Democracy: The Nonpartisan League in North American Politics.

EPISODE REFERENCES:

Arthur Vandenberg: The Man in the Middle of the American Century / Hendrik Meijer

The Heartland: An American History / Kristin Hoganson

Grasslands Grown: Creating Place on the US Northern Plains and Canadian Prairies / Molly P. Rozum

Back East: How Westerners Invented a Region / Flannery Burke

Supermarket USA: Food and Power in the Cold War Farms Race / Shane Hamilton

Nuclear Country: The Origins of the Rural New Right / Catherine McNicol Stock

Lester E. Helland Papers, Wisconsin Veterans Museum, Madison

Praise for the book:

“From Lend-Lease to Food for Peace, Global Heartland reveals how rural Midwesterners came to see their farms as being at the heart of the world.”
—Kristin Hoganson

“This rich and revealing book transforms the way we think about the rural heartland.”
—Michael Lansing

Global Heartland: Cultivating the American Century on the Midwestern Farm by Peter Simons is available from University of Minnesota Press.